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In a move to compete against Oracle, SAP has rolled out Business Suite powered by SAP HANA. The new software aims to help enterprises run their business in real time within the window of opportunity to instantly complete transactions, analyze data and predict trends. The overarching promise is to allow companies to translate real-time insights into immediate action.

SAP said a variety of business scenarios -- including marketing analysis, financial close, receivables management, material resource planning, as well as consumer and social sentiment analysis -- and the most used operational reporting and analytics have been specifically optimized with its new product.

"We can now eliminate the traditional trade-offs between cost and performance and reinvent real-time business while dramatically simplifying our customers' landscapes, together with a strong open ecosystem of partners," said Vishal Sikka, a member of the SAP Executive Board who is responsible for technology and innovation at the company. He also noted that SAP Business Suite continues to support and optimize for all major databases in the industry.

SAP's Big Data Bet

Practically speaking, SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA lets enterprises manage mission-critical business processes in real time using the same relevant live data. That includes planning, execution, reporting and analysis. SAP is winning impressive consumer nods.

"After a successful initial experience, we quickly made the decision to adopt SAP HANA as a platform of choice for many of our existing and future applications," said Derek Dyer, director, Global SAP Services, Deere and Co. "We consider this major innovation from SAP as a new way to manage our business by revolutionizing the way we introduce new products and services to the market, drive critical processes for us such as materials requirement planning in real time and even explore a new world where predictive maintenance now becomes possible."

With the increasing pace of business and shorter decision cycles, SAP is betting there is a growing need to reduce the time needed to capture, analyze and act on information. Henry Morris, senior vice president for IDC's Worldwide Software, Services and Big Data, said SAP Business Suite running on SAP HANA responds to the need.

"By combining both transaction processing and analytics on a single platform, SAP HANA supports a blended system of record and of decisions," Morris said. "The integration of transaction management with real-time decision management eliminates the delays and inefficiencies inherent in parallel operational and business intelligence systems. This enables employees to make better tactical, operational and strategic decisions based on relevant, granular, up-to-the-moment data."

HANA's High Goals

Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told us SAP and HANA have been one of the most powerful of the commercial providers of analytics.

"However, doing analytics isn't easy and implementation remains a problem. A package like this one simplifies implementation and gets the technology in use more rapidly so the benefits are more quickly realized," Enderle said. "We may be in the analytics decade of business software, but the products that define this decade will be the ones folks actually get working. This announcement showcases that SAP wants HANA to be one of those products."